‘SHORT’ COURTSHIP:Ava Gardner was a virgin when she wed Mickey Rooney in 1942, but says she “caught on very quickly.” Photo:

(MPTV)

‘SHORT’ COURTSHIP: Ava Gardner was a virgin when she wed Mickey Rooney in 1942, but says she “caught on very quickly.” (
)

She was broke and alone and usually drunk, a one-time Hollywood goddess who had two choices: “I either write the book or sell the jewels,” she said. “And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.”

And so, in January 1988, Ava Gardner, ravaged by booze and cigarettes and a recent stroke, called British journalist Peter Evans and asked him to ghostwrite her memoirs. What followed were the extended deathbed confessions of a legend, compiled for the first time in Evans’ last book, “Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations.”

Among the shocking revelations: first husband Mickey Rooney was such a womanizer that he cheated on Ava, then considered the most beautiful woman in the world, in their marital bed — while she was in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy.

“He went through the ladies like a hot knife through fudge,” she said, adding that her best friend Lana Turner — who’d slept with Rooney first — called him “Andy Hard-On.”

Gardner went on to marry bandleader Artie Shaw — “another kind of bully; he was always putting me down” — and then, most famously, Frank Sinatra, who left his wife for her.

Sinatra knew it was true love on their first date, when they went for a late-night drunken drive from Palm Springs to Indio and “shot out streetlights and store windows” with a pair of .38s the Chairman kept in his glove compartment.

While seeing Sinatra, Gardner also had an affair with the married Robert Mitchum. “I was crazy about him,” she said. When she told Mitchum that she was also seeing Sinatra, he ended things. “He said, ‘Get into a fight with him, and he won’t stop until one of you is dead,’ ” Gardner said. “He didn’t want to risk it being him.”

Gardner was a teenage virgin from Grabtown, NC, when she was discovered by a talent scout in 1941. She’d grown up poor and uneducated, yet her mother always knew that Ava had what it took to be a movie star. So did she.

She knew she wasn’t a great actress, and didn’t much care: “A lot of my stuff ended up on the cutting-room floor,” she said. “A lot more should have.”

After a screen test, she was signed to a seven-picture deal with MGM, and quickly became sought after by nearly every leading man in Hollywood. On her first day on the lot, she met Rooney, the 5-foot-2 star of the wholesome “Andy Hardy” series.

“I wanted to f–k you the moment I saw you,” he told her. Gardner was 18 and innocent. “I was shocked,” she said. “I still didn’t know he was the biggest wolf on the lot . . . He’d screw anything that moved.”

After a one-year courtship they wed, and one of Hollywood’s greatest sex symbols was a virgin on her wedding night. “I caught on very quickly,” she said.

After Rooney came Howard Hughes. “I never loved him,” she said, adding that despite the generosity he showed her, paying for her dying mother’s medical care, he was also a racist. “Howard wouldn’t piss on a black man to put him out if he was on fire,” she said.

Then, in 1945, she married Shaw — who’d also left his wife for her. But now Gardner was smoking three packs of Winstons a day and getting drunk constantly; she felt so intellectually insecure around her new husband that she finally took an IQ test.

“He had me convinced that I was completely stupid,” Gardner said. “I didn’t have an enormous IQ, but I did have a high one.”

One week after their first anniversary, Shaw dumped her for another woman.

“The bastard broke my heart,” she said, and throughout her life she picked the wrong men. — including George C. Scott, who Gardner said would often drunkenly “beat the s–t out of me.”

In 1951 she married Sinatra, who she later called the love of her life. Their relationship was famously tempestuous, and her best friend Turner — who’d also had affairs with Shaw and Sinatra — begged Gardner not to go

through with it: “I’ve been there, honey,’ she told me. ‘Don’t do it!’ I should have listened to her.”

Gardner had two abortions during her marriage to Sinatra, and a courtship that began with “fighting all the time, boozing and fighting,” ended the same way. They divorced in 1957, but remained close for the rest of their lives, and when Gardner pulled out of completing her memoirs, Evans suspected that Sinatra gave her the money she would have gotten for the book.

Her decision wasn’t a complete surprise to Evans; she would later say that when she was “pushing clouds around,” he could publish their book.